The same 5:30 am alarm was a mercy this time. I'd been awake since four, staring at the ceiling of my flat, my mind a tangled mess of formations, pressing triggers, and what-ifs that wouldn't stop spinning.
Saturday. Match day. The final test. Ninety minutes against Inter Milan's U18s. Not a sixty-minute kickabout, not a friendly where the result didn't matter and everyone went home happy.
This was a proper match, a full ninety minutes, the last chance for Eberechi Eze and Antoine Semenyo to prove they belonged here, to prove that the last three weeks of relentless work, of early mornings and late nights, of one-on-one sessions and tactical drills, hadn't been a waste of time.
The last chance for me to prove that I wasn't just some lucky kid who'd stumbled into a job he didn't deserve, that the Millwall win hadn't been a fluke, that I could actually do this.
